My Year in Books Survey: The First 50

Now that I am fifty books into my reading challenge I think it is a good time to step back and survey my year thus far. I have the Chess cast album playing in the background and I am ready for some stats!

So, the first fifty books were written by 37 unique authors. The first thing to study is the sex of these writers. Am I keeping a good balance between male and female? Let’s see:

Hmmmm almost. Of all the authors I read, 21 were male and 16 were female. I am presuming that Elena Ferrante is a female here. I’m not overly happy with this but it is far better than previous years. I must actively read more women. I hope that by the 100 book survey that the pie chart is more evenly halved. Although, to be honest, university is starting again soon and those reading lists are utter sausage fests so this might be a challenge.

Then comes the embarrassing question of race. I always fall down when it comes to reading diversely. I put it down to no effort from myself and just an overwhelming lack of knowledge of non-white writers. I need to educate myself.

Just look at that mess. 31 of the authors are white. Three are black (Grace Jones, Nella Larsen, and Tsitsi Dangarembga) and two were Asian (Yukio Mishima and Banana Yoshimoto). There is no evidence of Elena Ferrante’s race yet so I’m not going to presume she’s white. My current problem is that I’m trying to read all of my TBR shelf and that whole shelf is 99% white. I feel like I’m always making excuses for not reading diversely. I’m so useless. My goal is to make that pie chart at least a quarter non-white by the next survey.